Imagine you’re sick, or you think you might be sick, and you want to talk to a doctor. Instead of waiting a week or two to see your primary care physician, you just open an app on your phone or computer and within minutes you’re video-chatting with a doctor or nurse. Maybe you even have a medical device, like a blood pressure monitor, that connects your computer and transmits images and data to your doctor in real time while you’re talking.

That’s not science fiction. It’s called telemedicine, an $18 billion worldwide industry and one of the fastest-growing sectors in health care. In many ways, telemedicine represents the future of health care, promising to do for medicine what Uber and Lyft have done for transportation. Across the country, the use of telemedicine is expanding as consumers realize how much more convenient it is to talk to a doctor when and where they choose. It’s also a lot cheaper. The average telemedicine visit costs between $40 and $50, compared to the average in-person doctor’s visit, which is about $100 more—not counting the cost of the time and effort it takes to travel to and from a brick-and-mortar doctor’s office.

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Source: TexasMonthly